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Midway Lands in Charlotte

Leaves McKinney for Loeffler Ketchum & Mountjoy ATLANTA–Midway Airlines last week moved its ad account from McKinney & Silver in Raleigh, N.C., to in-state rival Loeffler Ketchum Mountjoy. Billings for the Durham, N.C.-based air carrier were slightly more than $4 million last year, according to Competitive Media Reporting. “The whole airline business has become different,” said Mark Coleman, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Midway. “We are quite a small account by airline standards. McKinney is a terrific agency. Their creative was unbelievably good, but I think they’re designed for a different kind of account. They made every effort to accommodate those differences, but we’re a retail kind of business.” Coleman said he parted with McKinney on good terms. “We’re crazy about them and feel we did some good work,” said McKinney senior vice president Janet Northen. “We think they picked a great agency.” Officials at Loeffler Ketchum Mountjoy in Charlotte went after Midway’s business by referring to other clients that demand a similarly heavy retail workload. “We showed them our history with Mannington Floors,” said agency president John Ketchum. “We do 600 jobs for a New Jersey client a year. Then we talked about the way we would go about learning their business, and how we did that with [LKM clients] Velux Skylights and Cooper Tools. I think that brought us some credibility in their eyes.” Midway makes 132 nonstop daily flights between its hub at Raleigh-Durham International Airport and 19 destinations in 12 states. When the account went into review, the client only considered North Carolina agencies, starting with a list of six shops before trimming to two. Coleman did not disclose the name of the other finalist. He said LKM’s first major work will not surface until later this year. It is possible, Coleman added, that the current tagline–“Feel like flying again”–may be changed to “better reflect our positioning.”